Constitution at Troynovant:
structures of American founding documents:
Declaration of Independence
& United States Constitution;
debates on constitutionality;
listed by Title
  

See Law at Troynovant for legal institutions and matters less specifically related to American constitutional structure.
  

As the Declaration of Independence is America's definitional document, so the United States Constitution provides the structural framework for its core political institutions.

You, I, each one of us, is a minority of one. The Constitution, by limiting the trespass of institutions upon individuals, defends our natural right as rational, social individuals to live in harmonious society.

I want you to protect the Constitution. Learn, and stand up.

Robert Wilfred Franson

  
[Belmont.]

Portia:

Some dear friend dead, else nothing in the world
Could turn so much the constitution
Of any constant man.

William Shakespeare
The Merchant of Venice, 3.2.244-246

  
Governments that rest only on a single idea or on a single, easy-to-define sentiment are perhaps not the best, but they are surely the strongest and the most lasting.

When one examines the Constitution of the United States, the most perfect of all known federal constitutions, one is frightened, on the contrary, by the quantity of diverse knowledge and by the discernment that it supposes in those whom it must rule. The government of the Union rests almost wholly on legal fictions. The Union is an ideal nation that exists so to speak only in minds, and whose extent and bounds intelligence alone discovers.

Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America  (1835-1840)
edited & translated by Mansfield & Winthrop

  
We may find it illuminating to think of the United States Constitution not quite as the inspired grantor of rightly understood American Exceptionalism, but as its early intellectual expression and beleaguered but ongoing practical catalyst. The Ship of State is not a perpetual-motion machine. Here's a fictional analogy.  — RWF
  

Captain of salvage spaceship:

Right. Your mechanical trouble. Compression coil, you say?

Malcolm Reynolds, Captain of disabled Serenity:

It was the catalyzer.

Captain of salvage spaceship:

Not even the coil? Catalyzer's a nothing part, Captain.

Malcolm Reynolds:

It's nothing til you don't got one. Then it appears to be everything.
  

Out of Gas written by Tim Minear,
episode 8 of Firefly created by Joss Whedon

"Out of Gas" shooting script in
Firefly: The Official Companion, Volume Two